Blink And You Miss It - But Tiny Town`s Worth A Stop

August 31, 1991|By Jon Anderson.

Like Brigadoon, the mythical Scottish village that keeps disappearing, tiny Hainesville is not found on many maps. Located along Ill. Hwy. 120 between Grayslake and Round Lake, it is the oldest chartered village in Lake County-though its population, 183, could fit into one Chicago apartment building.

``Blink and you miss it,`` sniffs one traveler who regularly shoots through the village on her way north to Fox Lake.

``A couple of gophers, that`s about it,`` adds a mystery writer who lives near a pond several miles away.

Yet there is an elusive sense of community. People drive to nearby Round Lake or Grayslake to shop or go to church, Kemp says, ``but you say `hi` to people from Hainesville when you see them.``

So, what`s the talk of Hainesville? Quite a bit these days. How many villages with 56 houses can boast of a trap and skeet gun club where sharpshooters bring down flying crockery? Or a tattoo parlor where they can drill a peacock into a right arm for $160? Or Softball City, a four-diamond complex where actor Bill Murray recently pitched at a charity outing, impressing the locals by hitting a triple and a homerun, then taking off in a limousine to return to Chicago and the set of ``Mad Dog and Glory``?

Nor was Murray the first celebrity to drop by Hainesville and say hello.

``Abe Lincoln used to hang out here with Elijah Haines, the founder of this village,`` said four-term Mayor George Benjamin during a tour of his village that, with stops for local color, took up most of an afternoon.

``There`s an old frame house just east of Hainesville Road. They claim Lincoln stayed in that house, though I personally doubt it,`` he added, swinging his Lincoln Town Car by Gerald DeBruyne`s place that now serves both as a home and as an implement store selling mowers, tillers, small tractors and chain saws.

Like the Springfield joke about ``the man who was so old that he remembered when Lincoln was a precinct captain,`` Elijah Haines, later to become an esteemed historian and lawyer, went back a long way with the Great Emancipator.

The two met at the Great River and Harbor Convention in Chicago in 1847, reports a Hainesville history put together in 1976 a the village`s

contribution to the Bicentennial. Later, Haines rose in Illinois political circles, twice serving as speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives.

Winters were tougher than now when Haines was brought to the area, with its rolling prairie, by his mother and stepfather in 1838. One violent November snow, followed by sleet, covered the land with white crust that stayed so long that pioneers still used sleighs to reach Chicago in April.

None of this deterred young Elijah Haines. Besides tending to farm chores, he studied surveying, laid out roads, studied law and looked after the local post office.

On February 26, 1847, the village was duly incorporated and, with the approval of 50 residents, named after him. By then, Hainesville had a store, blacksmith shops, a wagon maker, tailor, school house and tavern.

In 1848 came another revenue source, a plank road from Waukegan to McHenry. A certain Mrs. Arnold and her daughter tended the gate, one of three along the road, charging 10 cents a vehicle. They also cared for the sick at a local pest house, set up in an abandoned school during a small pox epidemic.

Then, at the turn of the century, the Literary Society of Hainesville built Lyceum Hall, for more than 25 years a popular spot for shows, dances and parties. It was, some said, Hainesville`s golden era.

They were days of good train service. High school students commuted to Libertyville High School. More than one old-timer remembers boarding the 7:30 a.m. local to Chicago which trundled across the rolling hills with two passenger cars, a baggage car, six milk cars and 75 kids among its morning travelers. But the railroad station that survived that era was put in Round Lake, not Hainesville. It was a hard blow to the town`s growth.

Much of Hainesville is farmland, more than half of it belonging to the Grayslake Gelatin Co., whose 1,000-acre spread is now entirely a dairy operation, one of eight left in Lake County.

Prices of homes, most of them bungalows clustered near the Round Lake Beach border, have risen from $30,000, in the 1970s, to about $80,000 now. Some of the older homes have an historic charm. The old DeBruyne house dates back about 150 years. Its basement walls, of cobblestones, drip waterfalls each time it rains.

To some, the town`s smallness is an asset. ``It`s a great place to raise kids,`` said Betty Lisk who moved there with her husband, Norbert, in 1965.

``We have nine and never had a bit of trouble. Since they got bused back and forth, I always knew exactly where they were - at school or at home.``